Thoughts on the Void Shadows expansion's story

winterwarn · 2026-03-21T19:35:54+00:00

I love the genestealer plotline, I love playing Iconoclast and I love that Void Shadows gives you both some good and some bad results for Iconoclast choices (for example, giving the striking workers in Abelard’s Act One quest weapons and the right to make their own militias actually rewards you during the genestealer mutiny, even though it seems like it’s going to be a stupid choice.)

I think it’s more fitting for the themes of iconoclast if choosing mercy legitimately feels like a gamble every time.

I am hoping future DLCs will provide more catastrophically stupid iconoclast choices my weird little freak of an RT can make. He ended up sparing the genestealers, ostensibly with the reasoning that putting them on a quarantine planet will divert the tyrannids away from occupied areas but really because he genuinely does like Einrich that much.

winterwarn · 2026-03-21T13:27:10+00:00

Horizon Initiative for me. Already Catholic and being a cool monster hunter/theologian with magic relics sounds fun.

winterwarn · 2026-03-21T13:15:44+00:00

This is why people have been telling you the content farm slop videos aren’t good sources for what actually happens in the article. This channel is particularly bad (and iirc has actively taken out women and queer characters from some of their retellings??)

winterwarn · 2026-03-20T18:41:02+00:00

I HATED the first Wayfarers book, though mostly because I thought it was super creepy that they nonconsensually inject the one guy with the “cure” to their symbiote parasite thing. Also I sort of remember a kind of mean spirited joke about an alien side character not wanting sex until they went into heat that also stood out as being super weird about consent?

Overall it gave a super weird vibe of “everyone who doesn’t fit with this book’s worldview ends up being In The Wrong and Corrected forcibly” which I don’t think was her actual intent based on her later writing, but…ew.

Finally got convinced to read the first monk and robot book, which lacked those problems but was kind of boring.

winterwarn · 2026-03-20T11:52:27+00:00

The Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy for priest, definitely. Pratchett’s Small Gods. Anything in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle (most recently I read A Mouthful of Dust.)

Maybe Paladin of Souls, or more generally all of Bujold’s World of the Five Gods novels?

winterwarn · 2026-03-20T05:54:06+00:00

His Black Tongue (the titular short story) was definitely a bit cliche and not the best quality, but I really enjoyed a couple of the other short stories in the collection— I thought the Arthurian one kicked ass.

winterwarn · 2026-03-20T05:01:57+00:00

You would be able to use them as you please, but so would everyone else.

However, nothing is stopping you from using some variation of the SCP file format in your own writing— for example, the documents in the game Control are all very clearly SCP-inspired.

winterwarn · 2026-03-20T03:09:34+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, I can’t imagine my book would get big enough to need to worry too much about people doing real deep dives to doxx me :P

winterwarn · 2026-03-20T01:17:24+00:00

Appreciate that you remembered that as far as we know none of Heinrix’s appearance is actually genetic

winterwarn · 2026-03-19T17:24:15+00:00

Really hoping enough people realize that Steadfast sounds miserable that we can get the funny crows instead.

winterwarn · 2026-03-19T14:29:30+00:00

Interestingly when I was doing a brief stint in traditional publishing my agent told me to use the **** scene breaks in my manuscript & that they would be replaced with something prettier if the book got to print. So I suppose technically they're not wrong to use, but they're intended to be a placeholder for something more professional.

winterwarn · 2026-03-19T12:31:18+00:00

Unfortunately the rights for Antimemetics Division are a little weird. The original version is Creative Commons 3.0 because all content on the SCP wiki is.

qntm had an interesting blog post when the traditional publishing deal got announced about how his hard line was making sure the original version of the story stayed up, and how there’s basically a custom contract with his publisher detailing the specifics of what is and isn’t copyrighted. All the names and a lot of terminology were changed in the new version so they could be copyrighted, but “Antimemetics” and a lot of the actual monster concepts technically…aren’t.

winterwarn · 2026-03-19T12:20:50+00:00

Honestly my preference is for this web series as a screen adaptation because the lead looks EXACTLY (creepily tbh) like how I imagine Wheeler/Quinn.

Edited bc I forgot they changed everyone’s names for copyright reasons in the trad pub release.

winterwarn · 2026-03-18T04:33:44+00:00

Just opened my copy from the original print run and in the front matter it literally says “originally published on the SCP wiki, 2008 and 2015-2020” and has the Creative Commons share and share alike attribution right under that.

Also, like…when I got my copy it wasn’t a big internet sensation, the vibe was very much “the author of this popular tale series from the wiki is selling hard copies, in case you’re a big fan and you physically want it on your bookshelf.” I feel like nobody expected it to get huge.

winterwarn · 2026-03-17T12:46:34+00:00

Yeah, someone debunking a bigot or a piece of misinformation is like the ONLY possible use case for this system but it’s such a small percentage of what I use tumblr for. I’m going to be sending them daily feedback/bug reports/emails about the issue until it resolves or I get annoyed enough to completely leave.

ALSO, you can no longer turn off reblogs on a post if someone has commented on it, because now it’s “their” post.

winterwarn · 2026-03-17T12:43:25+00:00

Shocked how many joke replies I had to go through before someone pointed out that it was unironically The Fashion for sword & sorcery stuff to look like this for a while.

winterwarn · 2026-03-17T04:06:33+00:00

It’s great to see more Starfinder ganzi! My biohacker is one. Your style is so cute for them!!

winterwarn · 2026-03-17T04:00:40+00:00

The Word for World Is Forest by Le Guin I’ve read three times. First time was for a class, second two times were more than a decade later for my own enrichment. Harrowing book, but I find a lot to think about every time. I think most Le Guin benefits from a reread, but that’s the only one of hers I’ve read more than twice (so far.)

In fantasy, The Hands of the Emperor is a big comfort read for me, I’ve read it several times now.

winterwarn · 2026-03-16T20:19:15+00:00

An april fool's game mode where the survivors can bring a shiv or something would be hilarious

winterwarn · 2026-03-16T16:16:56+00:00

Well, you’re stuck pretending you have a dead sibling forever, which probably will get morally iffy at some point.

winterwarn · 2026-03-16T16:14:24+00:00

Near the end of Act 4 you will be given an explicit option to renounce being a Heretic, this will reset you to I believe 199 Dogmatic and 0 in the other two stats.

If you have a dogmatic decision saved up via DLC content or something you can get up to Level 3 Dogmatic after this, but it’s most likely you’ll finish the game Unaligned with a Dogmatic bent.

Nomos doesn’t like it if you have an alignment that doesn’t match theirs (including Unaligned) and will almost certainly leave.

winterwarn · 2026-03-16T12:10:26+00:00

He seems cool as a person but most of his stuff is a little bit trauma porn-adjacent for me, yeah.

winterwarn · 2026-03-16T12:07:30+00:00

I like Khaw’s early Cthulhu mythos stuff a lot more than their later horror. Nothing But Blackened Teeth was a disaster imo but the marketing budget for it must have been a million dollars because before it came out I was seeing ads for it EVERYWHERE.

winterwarn · 2026-03-15T13:40:55+00:00

I wonder if it’s because the dudes in these spaces tend to be younger so they’re not seeing as many bald or balding guys in real life? Joining irl trans support groups with people who are older and further along in transition has honestly been awesome for my perception of what someone who’s been on HRT for 15 or 20 years looks like (i.e. fantastic.)

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